Robert Picard discusses how Hightower thinks about bringing private markets into portfolios
My name is Robert Picard. I head up private market solutions at Hightower Advisors. Hightower is a community of 135 separate advisor businesses and wealth management firms spread across the United States in approximately 34 different states. I've been working in capital markets now for 32 years. During that time, I've built five separate multi-billion-dollar alternative investment businesses.
My career is the result of a certain amount of experience, including trading Swiss franc dollars and convertible bonds, structured products, and global equity derivatives. All of these complex trading strategies have enabled me and given me the opportunity to really embrace and understand complex trading strategies and private market investments.
It's critical, as part of Hightower's success, that we continue to build out value-added services for all of our wealth management teams. The framework we use when discussing private markets with our wealth management teams and our advisors is, first, we have a very wide spectrum of knowledge across our client base. Bob Oros, our CEO, and Stephanie Link, who heads up investment solutions, who I work with, both are very adamant that we have to leave as much autonomy as possible to the fiduciary—whether it's our wealth management or our advisor team—and they have a good knowledge of their clients. It's important to us to provide them with as much information and tools to be able to approach their clients, to start to explain and approach how they want to present private markets in their asset allocation within their portfolios.
Typically, we go from a 5%, 10%, 20% allocation, which is 5% for a conservative portfolio, 10% for a balanced portfolio, and 20% for a more growth-oriented portfolio, from a private markets perspective. My advice for a framework to incorporate private markets into your portfolio is as follows: The way I look at it, traditional public equity and public fixed income are very efficient; they're transparent. There's information online and on your handheld devices.
Now, private market investments are much less efficient, and they do provide, though, the opportunity for improved risk-adjusted returns. Obviously, there's less liquidity with private market solutions, and our clients need to be rewarded for that lack of liquidity with higher risk-adjusted returns.
Now, the way I would look at this is, I'll throw out two numbers: 5 and 50. Right now, the average university endowment and the average billionaire both allocate more than 50% of their portfolio to private market solutions. The individual investor, many of whom we deal with on a day-to-day basis here at Hightower, have less than 5% invested in private markets. And really, what we're looking to do now is to try to close that gap between the average billionaire and university endowment and the individual investor.
There have been a number of new products, a number of innovations that have allowed for high-net-worth investors to access those same investments, or similar investments. And these are basically products that have been created by some leading private equity and investment firms that allow for high-net-worth investors lower minimums, meaning $15,000, $20,000, $25,000. They're very often registered with the SEC, they're in 1099 format, evergreen, they're perpetual investments that are available every month, and they have a certain amount of liquidity.
And those funds, those innovative products which did not exist five or ten years ago, are now available and have allowed for what we refer to as the democratization and miniaturization of the private markets.